This novel is about Jess, a left wing trade unionist and student lawyer who, caught up in a fast-paced Sydney inner city life, goes to a hypnotist in an effort to drink less and instead has an experience of God. Her conscious self cannot cope with this and she represses it, but it still exists in a deeper part of her and the novel tracks the path by which she finally hauls and hacks her way back to it. The novel is divided into four parts, David, Jane, Padma and Jess. The first three parts tell of her emotionally dependencies on other people, and in the last section she finally finds a kind of hard-won peace and self-acceptance, and a love of God that is rooted in the small joys of her daily life. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Creative Writing)

This thesis is in the form of a novel about three work colleagues who, as part of their job, have to drive long distances together. The story is told from the perspective of all of them but mainly from one of the women who tells the story in the first person. The man and two women are so different from each other in personality and outlook on life, and the basis of the novel is their interactions with each other, the frictions within their relationships, and the thoughts that go through their heads while they are driving. These people spend long hours together in the car and in motel rooms yet they never get any closer to each other. The only one of them who seems to get anything from the experience is the woman who is in the first person, as she achieves a greater sense of her own identity. The other two regard the experiences as just another job and of no great importance in their lives. / Master of Arts (Hons)

This thesis is comprised of a survey of all the varying influences behind the author's art making. All pre-occupations are included, the concepts of childhood memory; the use of imagination; the ability to comprehend and put together an old fashioned story in varying forms; as well as considering the notion of blurring historical and actual fact with personal elements of fantastical fiction. These themes have all been threaded delicately through the motif of time-travel, the author's personal favourite of literary genres. The main aim has been to make an attempt to re-create the feelings of childhood.Whilst embracing whimsy, the absurd and the time travel genre, this project hopefully shows a struggle and is an allegorical comment on the author as an artist, who having lost a little of his faith in the world and his abilities, becomes seduced by a new focus. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Creative Arts)

The first section of this paper examines the formation and portrayal of female/lesbian identity within Australian Literature with particular reference to the Bush Mythology tradition of the 1800's. Through reviewing a number of works classed as lesbian fiction it is argued that a more positive portrayal of lesbian love within Australian fiction is needed. To facilitate this shift in attitude traditional literary motifs, such as the journey and the bush, (typically the preserve of male characters) can be appropriated by a female hero. In the process of re-imagining the bushman's journey as one undertaken by a female/lesbian hero, the bush emerges as a force that can facilitate the hero on her journey toward a sense of wholeness. In keeping with the tradition of Feminist, Lesbian and Heroic literature Stringybark Summer charts the increasing self awareness of a young Australian lesbian as she journeys into the bush. The third person narrative follows the protagonist as she embarks on a journey into the unknown in order to discover the deeper meaning about her self, the world and those who share it with her. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Communication and Media)

The Torch Collector is a Magical Realist novel set in Sydney. It is a story of non conformity, history, hope. The story moves between three recognisable but not clearly identifiable spheres. A past, a present and the non identified other, which could be called the unreal, magical, other-worldly or third-dimensional The genderless protagonist collects torches which enable him/her to transgress the boundaries between the spheres of existence. S/he moves freely across filling the gaps in her/his identity created by her/his cross-cultural background. The novel examines life on the fringe of contemporary Australian society. The Torch Collector's position appears to be voluntary, defined by his/her relationship to the torches. This vital relationship prevents the protagonist from fully engaging in conventional life. It is also a story of Sydney. A city which hides its cross-cultural spirituality underneath a highly urban and technological facade. / Master of Arts (Writing)

Holmwood is the novel which constitutes the major work submitted towards my PhD in Creative Writing. It is accompanied in a second volume by an exegesis of the generative and governing notions which I deem to bear on this work. The novel is a contemporary Australian fiction set in the city of Adelaide and focusing on a period of a month or so in the entwined lives of two sisters, Evie and Paula Haggerty, women in their forties. Holmwood grows out of my abiding preoccupation with the acculturation of women worldwide towards a muting and dilution of selfhood and identity, but it is a novel rather than a tract, attempting in particular a psychological verisimilitude and therefore situated largely within the minds of the central characters, who refract and provide a slant on the narrative. Evie and Paula are bound in family bonds and by shared responsibility for Paula' s children. The sisters work in early-child -care and aged-care respectively, their work scenarios providing a context and perspective for their mid-life entanglements with new partners and ongoing struggles with unresolved birth-family and young-adult relationship dilemmas. The close connections of both sisters with adolescents points up their residual attachment to a youth-culture neither has definitively left. I propose the Haggerty sisters as modest heroines of a difficult chapter in history, not alert to all the meanings of their lives, indeed actively repressing many of them, damaged by early life-experiences, but victorious, to a great degree, against the challenges of their adult lives. I hope this is an amusing and insightful novel about women of a certain age. It is squarely aimed at an identifiable market, thirty-plus women readers bored with 'chick lit'. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Humanities, 2005.

"March 2004" / Errata sheet back page in both volumes. / Bibliography: leaf 65. / 2 v. (v, 65 leaves, 244 leaves) ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of English, 2004

Thesis (M.A. (Hons.)) -- University of Western Sydney, 2003. / "A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Honours) Creative Arts" Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2000. / "This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury" Bibliography : leaves 170-191.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 2001. / A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Communication and Media), UWS Nepean, 2001. "The architect's dream - project manual for The concerto inn presents itself as the workbook of the Architect who has been commissioned by the elusive author of The concerto inn to design and construct a library. It stands as an endnote, a companion piece to the novel and is part architectural treatise and part ficto-criticism" -- Summary. Bibliography : Vol. 2, p. 114-120.